I assign selection sets to my meshes in Maya so I can select them in Zbrush to be visible or not, very handy. But I cant find any info in the Practical Guide on using this info, so all I know to do is CtrlShift click on an area and everything but that area becomes hidden then same function in the workarea to restore all, but what are all the options, like hide what you select, or hide multiple parts, so on a character you could choose to show the Torso, and the left leg, and so on.
When you initialy Ctrl+shift click on a model it hides everything but that group.
If you Ctrl+shift click a vertice shared by 2 or more groups it hides everything but those groups.
Once you have partial visibility Ctrl+shift clicking changes from selecting the group to hiding it.
To inverse the visibility selection Ctrl+shift click and drag outside of the model. Just a tiny drag will do it.
So lets say you want to hide everything but the eyelids of a character. You Ctrl+shift click and that should be it. But the character is very low poly so you end up including the eyebrows as well(multiple groups on 1 vertice). Now you are in partial visibility you can Ctrl+shift click the eyebrows and they will be hidden from view.
As soon as you have subdivided the model some times there will be many more vertices belonging to 1 group only. Which makes it easier.
Ctrl+shift click+dragging allows you to drag a rectangle and hide or select any polygons within that rectangle.
Ctrl+shift click+drag, selects the polygons.
Ctrl+shift click+drag(release ctrl+shift), hides the polygons.
You can change the way polygons are selected by turning on Point Selection Mode. In that mode you only need to Ctrl+shift click+drag over a vertice to hide/select that polygon. Otherwise you need to include the entire polygon.
If you want to hide something and leave everything else showing, do the normal ctrl-shift-drag, but let go of ctrl-shift after you begin to drag a rectangle.
By the way (and I don’t mean to hijack this thread), but is it possible to set up poly groups in 3DS Max before exporting to ZB? Been trying but have been unsuccesful.
Edit: Looks like TV was a bit faster on the post button. And with a better explanation too. 
Selecting / Deselecting groups involves an interesting finger dance that takes a little getting used to.
TVeyes explains it very well but I wanted to add a thought or two.
Undo (Control-Z) is REALLY handy when you’re trying to nail down specific poly groups but over or under select.
Likewise the redo (Control-Shift+Z) can be useful.
Note that the select rectangle works through the object - so you should check for polys unintentionally selected on the other side.
Finally, polygroup operations can work nicely with masking, especially when you have grouped objects, some of which you want to manipulate individually, either by further modeling or transformation: moving, scaling and rotating which can be done using the sliders under TOOL: Deformation.
Sven
cool thanks for the help guys,
you know what would really help out is if there was list of your groups, based on the name given in the 3d package when set up, and you could select the group name and it would become hidden this way you could select which groups you want hidden in a more intuitive way, a lot of the time the 2 groups you want to show or hide dont share an edge so how would you say show only both arms when they are on different parts of the mesh.
I agree, a list with named groups to click would be nice. And some way to select a group of groups with a single click.
Your two arms example is pretty simple. Ctrl+click the left arm, everything else is now hidden. Reverse the visibility and ctrl+click the other arm. Because you are in partial visibility that arm is now hidden. Yes, you guessed it, reverse the visibility again to view both arms
Finger dance, hehe I like that.
using the same methods you can regroup stuff too…such as the two arms to work on at the same time…make sure both arms are showing and go to tools>polygroups>groupvisible
you can always regroup the individual arms later before exporting if you need them to be seperate later.